CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: March 25, 1999

Correction Appended

There's still nothing quite as exhilarating as the spectacle of some of Hollywood's toughest wheeler-dealers, each of whom has an average income exceeding the G.N.P. of many countries, as they take umbrage at the shabby behavior of an upstart not yet in their club.

Such outrage! Such piety! Such wounded feelings!

For the rest of us: such bliss!

These guys remind us of the Bible-thumping, nostrum-peddling, dream-selling scalawags who roamed the American West even before Hollywood was discovered.

I refer to the ghastly events that unraveled in slow motion Sunday night at the Academy Awards show when Steven Spielberg's World War II melodrama, ''Saving Private Ryan,'' the odds-on favorite to control the night, was lyrically humiliated by ''Shakespeare in Love.'' The English romantic comedy, directed by John Madden, won the best picture Oscar and six others. How did ''Shakespeare in Love'' do it? Some would have you believe only by hook if not by outright crook.

''Saving Private Ryan,'' which had been hailed as something of a holy object even before its release in July, and which then went on to become a huge box office hit, won only five awards. True, they did include an Oscar for Mr. Spielberg's direction, but in the virtual reality of Hollywood, that's a virtual sop for the industry's virtual savior. Witness the responses to this upset as reported by my colleague Bernard Weinraub in The New York Times on Tuesday.

The main villain: Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman (with his brother Robert) of Miramax Films, the company that released not only ''Shakespeare in Love,'' but also Roberto Benigni's ''Life Is Beautiful,'' the Italian-made concentration camp comedy that was named the best foreign language film of the year. Mr. Weinraub reported, ''Dreamworks, which produced 'Private Ryan' with Paramount, was devastated'' by the Miramax victories. The principal criticism directed at Mr. Weinstein: during the Oscar voting period he spent too much money promoting his nominees in ads taken in the Hollywood trade papers, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

The head of another movie company complained: ''Look at what happened last night. The machinery Harvey put in place is like a juggernaut. All productions, all sense of logic and in some instances a sense of fairness is thrown out the window.'' Remember these charges are issuing from Hollywood, a town where the gospel has always been that you have to spend a buck to make a buck. Suddenly everybody's talking as if defending an Augustinian City of God against the forces of that other fellow: not the Devil exactly, but the unfashionable Harvey Weinstein from Brooklyn and Queens, educated at the State University at Buffalo. Even when dressed in designer suits, he gives the impression of having sat up all night in a stalled commuter train. No wonder he lives in New York.

The people in the Miramax Los Angeles office said the company actually bought fewer pages in the trades to promote ''Shakespeare'' (an estimated 118) than Dreamworks and Paramount to promote ''Private Ryan'' (an estimated 165). It's at this point the West Coast outrage becomes interesting and Hollywood-devious.

Among other things, no one competently addresses the fact that the Oscars are voted by 5,500 card-carrying members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, employees of the same executives who are so hypocritical about the success of Miramax. What the opposition really seems to be saying is that the voters are stupid and/or as susceptible to trade ads as toddlers are to the common cold.

There are changes going on in movies that Hollywood seems to be serenely unaware of, though the industry itself has both monitored and encouraged them. For one thing, the academy voters are no longer dominated by the Old Guard that made Hollywood a company town. Voters are younger now; many, possibly, are younger than the baby boomers who run the business and often dress as if they were their own children. The only vested voter interest today is in movies in general, not in particular titles or studios, at least not in any way that would seriously destabilize voting results.

As Hollywood has earnestly dumbed down its movies to suit more naive, impressionable audiences, it has fractured the movie audience, whose young, fad-oriented core group harbors tastes Hollywood can neither safely predict nor understand.

All the hard-sell hustle and ''unfair'' trade advertising in the world could not have turned ''Shakespeare in Love'' into the serious hit it has become if the potential had not been there to begin with. It's a very special movie, initially because of its grandly funny, multilayered, Oscar-winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, the incomparable Czech-born, English playwright.

It's both a brilliant, comic send-up of historical films (blocked genius category) and a sweetly limpid and affecting love story that rediscovers some of the romantic power within ''Romeo and Juliet.'' In this fashion it delights various different movie audiences that otherwise seldom overlap.

Poor old ''Private Ryan'' apparently came out of the starting gate too soon for the excitement to endure into Oscar time. It's last summer's movie. At the speed with which movies are consumed today, that's almost like saying it's as old as the original ''King Kong.''

For me, it still has the manner of a movie that was found in the editing room: the director and his associates, realizing the unusual tactile power of the Normandy landing scenes, filmed with hand-held cameras, decided to let it run at length (nearly 30 minutes), in this way to lend authenticity to the more or less commonplace World War II battle movie that followed.

How could a film hailed for its authenticity have featured a war-weary Army lieutenant (played by Tom Hanks) who looks as it he had spent his training in England hanging out at McDonald's? You don't have to hire an entire research department to find out what the guys on those beaches looked like: lean and exhausted.

This isn't to knock Mr. Spielberg's talents. He's one of the best, though not necessarily when dealing with Big Issues, which, as in ''Schindler's List'' and ''Amistad,'' he simplifies and sentimentalizes. He has a child's-eye view of the universe. He demonstrates an uncanny appreciation for children's fears and fantasies in ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' and ''Empire of the Sun,'' even in ''Jurassic Park.'' To hail him as an Eisenstein is to mislead him and the public.

The short theater life of even good films today may be one of the reasons that ''Private Ryan'' lost to ''Shakespeare.'' Another: the pompous ad campaign that announced the pre-Oscar re-release of ''Private Ryan.'' This would include radio spots that solemnly prepared us for the return of ''the most honored film of the year'' (or some such verbiage), intoned in the slightly bogus manner of someone selling an over-the-counter elixir designed to cure obesity, cancer and liver spots.

The Hollywood fury directed at Miramax and particularly Mr. Weinstein is based on something else. The Brothers Weinstein are not only unfashionable but, even worse, seriously successful. Coming from what Hollywood considers nowhere, they incorporated Miramax in 1979 and released their first film, ''The Secret Policeman's Other Ball,'' in 1982. Before being acquired by Disney in 1993, which deepened their pockets considerably, they had already released an impressive list of foreign and American independent films.

Among them: ''Sex, Lies and Videotape,'' ''Pelle the Conqueror,''''My Left Foot,'' ''The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover'' and ''Cinema Paradiso.'' The hoopla surrounding the success of ''The Crying Game'' in 1992 put the brothers in the public eye, which they have firmly held onto ever since.

These are the guys whom their Hollywood colleagues are now bad-rapping for caring only about winning Oscars. Is there anybody even remotely connected to the movie industry who doesn't share that dream? The way the Weinsteins acquire movies often looks as if they used a vacuum cleaner. They have released more than 150 since the early 1980's. But they've also released a high percentage of innovative and very popular works to reach audiences that the bigger boys in Hollywood have let go.

This post-Oscar outrage is a joke. Come on, fellows: shut up or invite the Weinsteins to join the club. Note to Harvey: When you find yourself going all-over humble and self-righteous, retire, or you'll win the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, sometimes given out at the Oscars for good works. In a phrase: the kiss of death.

Correction: March 29, 1999, Monday A Critic's Notebook article on Thursday about the reaction of some Hollywood filmmakers to the choice of ''Shakespeare in Love'' rather than ''Saving Private Ryan'' as the winner of the Academy Award for best film misstated the Army rank held by Tom Hanks in ''Saving Private Ryan.'' He was a captain, not a lieutenant.